Category Archives: douche

"Shining Time Station would be filthier than a Jersey truck stop if they hadn't recruited me as their conductor."

For those of you who are wondering if Ringo Starr is still a self-important assh*le, I can report to you today that yes, yes he most certainly is still a self-important assh*le. Not content with simply refusing to accept any more fan mail in his lifetime (a promise he made to his fans in October of 2008 in the video after the cut), Starr forges ahead in his quest to become the least likable Beatle, living or otherwise, with his recent interview with the Daily Mail’s Live Magazine in which he asserts that the he was a cool “big shot” when the rest of the band found him and that they were “lucky” to recruit him.

The sticksman, who replaced original drummer Pete Best two years after the Fab Four got together to form a band in 1960, claimed he was already a star in his former band Rory And The Hurricanes before he joined Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison.

“Within Liverpool I was a lot more well known than them,” he told the Daily Mail’s Live Magazine. Rory And The Hurricanes were big shots in the city. We had suits. That was our claim to fame. They were lucky to get me. It wasn’t just that I was a big shot, I was a cool drummer.” [via NME]

For all you uncultured swine reading this who are unfamiliar with British slang, allow me to translate….

The Snoop Dogg and Charlie Sheen collaboration that absolutely everyone no one has been clamoring for has finally surfaced. And it is every bit as terrible as you’d expect from a rapper who jumped the shark about eight years ago and an actor who nuked the fridge about eight weeks ago. It’s called…wait for it…”Winning.” Of course it is.

I miss young Death Row Snoop. The one who hung around with murderers and business-oriented thugs named Suge who held Vanilla Ice over balconies by his ankles. Come back to me, Doggfather!

Basically, Stevens put out an ambitious, at times well-crafted, but overall bloated, 22-track album called Illinois in 2005, and solidified his success amongst the indie music community by claiming that he intended to release a similar album, complete with the same extensive research and attention to detail that went into Illinois, for each of the remaining 49 American states. He then publicly gave up on the effort before so much as writing another state-related note.

And this week, he gave the most hipster interview I’ve ever laid eyes upon. What follows is just a sampling of the gems you’ll find in the Guardian UK’s interview that, I swear, reaches absurd heights of pretentiousness and indie-ness in general, the likes of which a brilliant parodist could only ever hope to come close to matching in his or her work.

Something tells me if the guy knew how the evening would play out, he'd choose "My Way" over "the highway."

Welp, it’s taken a surprising 16 years, but the first argument over Limp Bizkit’s music to result in murder has been reported. And it doesn’t play out as you’d hope expect…

A Sunshine Coast [Australia] man was bashed to death, put in a shopping trolley and dumped in a creek following a drunken fight over music selection, a court has heard. The court was told Emmanuel McPherson, 48, objected when his flatmate, James Albert Madden, played a Limp Bizkit album on Mr. McPherson’s stereo. A fight then broke out, in which Mr. Madden allegedly beat Mr. McPherson to death. Mr. Madden, 24, is on trial for Mr. McPherson’s murder. He pleads not guilty to the charge.

The dispute reportedly began when Mr. McPherson told Mr. Madden not to touch his stereo and told him to turn the CD off. A Brisbane Supreme Court jury was told Mr. Madden hit Mr. McPherson about the head with an alcohol bottle, punched him and stomped on his face as he lay on the floor.

He was found the next morning and although Mr. Madden initially denied any involvement in the death of his “bro”, he was charged with Mr. McPherson’s murder. Mr. Cummings said the jury would hear a confession he made to a man Mr. Madden believed was a fellow cellmate, but was in fact an undercover police officer who had recorded four hours of conversations he had with Mr. Madden in a jail cell. The jury will hear the officer ask Mr. Madden if he was going to be released. He replied: “No. I’ve murdered a man. Killed him a couple of days ago.” [Brisbane Times via Ultimate-Guitar.com]

Well, this is kinda depressing. Of course the loss of life is tragic, and I don’t mean to make light of horrifying, senseless violence like this, but why’d it have to be one of the good guys? I was preemptively brimming with schadenfreude when I saw the headline and started reading, but nooOOoo, the guy sticking up for good taste in music just had to be the guy to get murdered. I guess god doesn’t have as much of a sense of humor as I’d hoped for.

Even still, this raises some questions…

Was “Break Stuff” playing in the background during the beating? Was a “muthaf*ckin chainsaw” not readily available?

Which album was playing? Maybe Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water just wasn’t the poor guy’s jam. Maybe he was more of a Three Dollar Bill, Yall$ kinda guy. Boy, that killer would sure feel like an ass, then. Bizkit “bros” gotta stick together, y’all!

Was the undercover cop cellmate disguised as a juggalo to coax the confession? They just seem so easy to talk to about those sorts of things.

Prince refuses to allow access to his new album through legitimate digital download services, shuts down his website, and declares that “the internet’s completely over,” and “Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.” (May 2010)

Let’s throw one more bullet point on there from just this week…

Prince tells George Lopez on Lopez Tonight that he’d like to a see a law enacted that will ban the ability of artists to cover and/or sample another artist’s piece of music, saying, “My problem is when the industry covers the music. There’s this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission. And that doesn’t exist in any other art form, be it books, movies – There’s only one version of ‘Law & Order.’ There’s several versions of ‘Kiss’ and ‘Purple Rain.” [via Ultimate-Guitar.com]

Well, Prince is right about one thing…there is a compulsory licensing law in effect in the US. One that protects the owners of copyrighted material by requiring those earning money off an existing piece of music to pay royalties to the owners of the material in question, while at same time protecting the freedom of speech of the new artists to sample or cover that original work as they please. This is nothing new and should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. Does this guy hate royalty checks?

When Prince went through his retarded “symbol-as-a-name” phase in 1993, it’s safe to say we all thought it was retarded in the “I can’t believe this egomaniac is actually doing this” sort of way, not in the literal sense of the word. Now, looking back at his public statements and battles since 2007, it’s obvious to me that the guy has a mental deficiency that’s slowly been publicly unmasked in recent years. I can’t even think of him as just a talented, arrogant pr*ck anymore. I feel bad for him in much the same way you’d feel bad for the dumb neighborhood dog that just can’t be taught to stop digging holes or sh*tting in yards.

One of these things is not like the others; One of these things just doesn't belong.

Helping to fill my quota of TV-induced cringing last week, Zakk Wylde made a surprise guest appearance on American Idol in support of resident “rocker” James Durbin’s Wednesday night performance. He had this to say about it to USA Today:

“I told [Black Label Society bandmate and bassist] J.D. [John DeServio] and the other guys in the band, ‘You know, I’m also known as Icon; they use the word ‘legendary’ around me. I guess now we can just throw ‘Idol’ in there,” Wylde said, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. “J.D.’s like, ‘Dude, I’m not going to puke, I’m going to go hang myself.’ So I’ll definitely get some mileage out of this.” [via Gibson.com]

I’ve embedded the video of the appearance below, and if you enjoy watching things that make you uncomfortable and incite endless douche chills, then by all means, watch the hell out of it. It’s almost as if Wylde had either been tricked into the gig or somehow had no prior notion of what the show is about. If you look closely, you can almost see the exact moment Wylde realized he had made a mistake, shortly followed by the moment he realized he would have to suppress his urge to strangle Randy Jackson with his bare hands on live television.

While I’d much rather be reporting about new Justin Timberlake solo tracks, I guess these two collaborations with Will.I.Am will have to do (god, I hate typing names with embedded punctuation). The second song “Going Crazy” (man, Will.I.Am just loves to party and get wild, doesn’t he?!?!) is garbage, as expected, but the first one, “Nature of the World,” actually has a very cool groove, reminiscent of early nineties’ Tribe Called Quest. But, of course, you still have to put up with Will.I.Am’s dopey political rapping overtop the beat, because when he’s not “getting retarded” or “going crazy” he means serious business, y’all…holla! Come on, J-Timbs, you don’t need him. Take that beat, and run! [via Some Kind of Awesome]

ALT VERSIONS OF WEEZER’S PINKERTON B-SIDES SURFACE

Remixed versions of two outtake tracks that appeared on Weezer’s recent Pinkerton reissue have been released, and you can hear them here. It’s easy to understand why the tracks, entitled “I Swear It’s True (Crushing Version)” and “You Won’t Get With Me Tonight (Crushing Version),” didn’t make the cut for the album, but it should go without saying that the songs are better than 97% of the crap Weezer have been regurgitating over the last ten years. [via Antiquiet]

ANOTHER NEW BEASTIE BOYS TRACK EMERGES

A new track off the upcoming Beastie Boys Hot Sauce Committee Part Two album was premiered on BBC 1 yesterday (listen here), and it’s making its internet rounds today. “Tadlock’s Glasses” is laid back and doesn’t hold a candle to last week’s “Make Some Noise” (and really, what can?), but it’s refreshing to here them experimenting again with a spaced-out sound that they merely touched upon in the early nineties. [via Consequence of Sound]